How to show time/duration on seekbar

Jun 29, 2014

Hi, 

I got a question from a client - is it possible to have the time remaining / duration / length show either on the built in Seekbar, or a way to custom make a seekbar that does that? In this case, the student is watching an embedding video, if the video is 10 minutes long, is there a way to show after 2 minutes have passed and 8 remaining, etc? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Stephanie

37 Replies
Daniele Piras

HI Bruce. How could I show "time palyed / total tieme" as in your example, in the standard player's seekbar of SL360 and both for video files or audio files (TTS audio files as well)?

I attach the print scree of what I see on the player config in SL360. Sorry for the stupid question, but I'm really new to Articulate tools.

 

Alyssa Gomez

Hi Daniele!

Bruce's screenshot shows the video control bar, which is different than the player seekbar. Although there isn't a feature to display time played/total time for audio and videos in the player, that would make an excellent feature request! 

Thanks for letting us know how we can make things better. 🙂

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi Doug,

I'm not such which name variable you've used before, but the seekbar doesn't have a variable value associated with it. 

Storyline isn't currently designed to expose system variables for user interaction. 

We do always want to better understand your needs so we can build even better software. Could you share a bit more on what specific system variables you'd like to see and examples of how they could be used? If you wanted to post here, please feel free - or send those ideas to our Product team here. 

Tamara Bloom

I would like this so our reviewers can tell us where items should come in for our animations. All of the resources we produce are translations, and we mainly use text and images timed to appear alongside audio. As the audio is completely different to the English originals, the translated text needs to appear and disappear at completely different times. I don't speak the languages, and without a timeline reviewers struggle to tell us where each line should come in. External timers don't help as they need to pause, jump back, etc to work it out. Manually inserting a custom solution for each slide and layer would be way too much work for what we need, also! Will submit a feature request, too :) 

Will Findlay

Thanks Lauren! It's probably not fair to just say I don't like the built-in video player without some explanation. By "built-in video player" I mean when you pick "Show Video Controls: Below video." on a video.

I don't like is that it introduces a second seek bar that can go out of sync with the default seek bar.  If the user jumps ahead on the "Video Controls" seekbar, the regular seekbar does not also jump ahead. However, if you move the original seekbar, it does move the Video Controls seekbar. So, if I want to use Video Controls I pretty much have to turn off the original seek bar.  This seems like it would be confusing to the user, e.g. "Why is there suddenly a different seek bar on this slide?" 

It would be much simpler to just allow a timer to show on the original seekbar:

Ray Boehmer

Yes, several years later; how is that feature request coming? There really NEEDS to be a way to see the timeline time counter in the player UI, full stop. Its a huge weakness vs the competition.

Not the least of which is for reviews. I automatically assumed that the review360 environment would automatically link reviewer comments and feedback to the exact place/time in the presentation that is active when the reviewer pauses it to make a comment.

Since it doesn't do that, the player UI really needs to have a timestamp for the reviewer to make note of.

Now, it would be great if storyline would have an option for a slide to 'lock its timeline' to a single placed video and - for that slide  - the player scrubber controls would inherit the videos exact timeline. Other objects could be placed on the timeline but its length would be locked to the video's length. This would allow for the display of timeline time counter in the player UI

I don't see very many possible use cases where showing the videos own playback controls is any kind of useful - Changing the video's playback time position relative to the overall timeline position is a really bad idea as implimented. It only makes sense if the video is
A: tied to the timeline as I described - in which case, why not just keep it hidden anyway.
B: if the overall playhead is paused whenever a particular video on the stage is playing.